BIOGRAPHY

The great Azerbaijanian poet and thinker Nizami Ganjevi (real name Ilyas son of Yousif) is one of the geniuses of the past, whose creative activity forms a distinctive and original stage in the history of the development of world culture.The most brilliant poet of the romantic epic that Azerbaijan gave to the world – Nizami became the symbol of Azerbaijanian poetry, his poems were not surpassed by anyone and have preserved freshness and vigor throughout the centuries.

Very little is known about his life. It is known that he was born in 1141 in Ganje and spent all his life in this city. Only once about 1185-1187 did he leave it, and then not by his own accord but because the King of Azerbaijan Qizil-Arslan-shah was passing by and expressly requested a meeting. However, as we see from his poems, Nizami was a well-educated, versatile man well acquainted with ancient Greek, Arabian and Persian literature. And that’s not surprising, since the X-XII cc. are called in historiography the "Golden Age" in the history of Azerbaijan. At that time Ganje, where poet lived, was one of the biggest cultural centers of Azerbaijan where trade routes from north to south, from east to west intercrossed.

Nizami wrote in Persian, since it was the basic literary language in the medieval Islamic Orient, with Arabic being the language of religion and science. Persian was also the official state language of the XII c. Azerbaijan Seljuk and Atabek feudal palaces. An authoritative expert on classical Persian-Tajik poetry and an outstanding orientalist Y.E. Bertels clearly shows that "the absence of national self-consciousness" prevented the Seljuk rulers from the progress of their native tongue*.

The epical works of Nizami consist of five separate poems that have been assembled by later generations into a collection called Khamsa (Five Poems or Quintuple). The Khamsa poems are "The Treasure-house of Mysteries", "Khosrov and Shirin", "Leyli and Mejnun", "Seven Beauties" and "Iskandarnama" (The Book of the Alexander the Great), which consists of two parts, "Sharfanama" and "Igbalnama".

It is doubtless that Nizami had a complete collection of lyrics – a divan consisting of ghazals, qassidas, rubaiyats, and others, probably, as much as 20.000 distiches, but practically, the whole of it has been lost, of only about 2.000 distiches preserved.

Virtue was one of the main factors characterizing Nizami. Humanism is the meaning and content of his poetry. Man and his destiny are the central themes in his creative activity. Nizami’s lyrical poems are, in fact, permeated with passionate emotion, many of which are dedicated to his beloved wife Afaq (Apaq - Snow-White in Azeri-Turkish).

Nizami had an uncommonly large number of imitators in Azerbaijan, Iran, Turkey, Central Asia, and even India. Three centuries later the great poet Fuzuli inspired by Nizami’s "Leyli and Mejnun" wrote his own masterpiece "Leyli and Mejnun" poem, this time in Azeri-Turkish. Tremendous admiration of Nizami is also reflected in the medieval Azerbaijanian and Middle Eastern miniature arts, where the themes are for the greater part taken from Nizami’s Khamsa.

[*Bertels, Velikiy azerbaydzhanskiy poet Nizami (Great Azerbaijanian poet Nizami). Baku 1940 p. 36]